Recapture the Wonder: Experiencing God's Amazing Promise of Childlike Joy by Ravi Zacharias

Author:Ravi Zacharias
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Christian Life, Christianity: General, Fiction, Religion, Christian life & practice, General
ISBN: 1591450187
Publisher: Thomas Nelson
Published: 2003-07-31T22:00:00+00:00

4

Enchantment in life

can never be realized in some thing;

it must ultimately culminate in

a person.

">CHAPTER FOUR

Wonder Unwrapped

A

HUNGARIAN MAN by the name of Andres Tamas was captured by the Russians toward the end of World War II and imprisoned in 1945. Because no one could understand the sounds he made he was assumed to be insane and sentenced to solitary confinement in a psychiatric detention center three hundred miles east of Moscow. His regular attempts to communicate with the guards when they brought his daily rations were dismissed as mere gibberish and ignored.

With the cold war over, Russia began to empty her overburdened prisons and so the Russian authorities finally brought a Hungarian psychiatrist to evaluate this patient, hoping to be able to turn over the responsibility of his keep to Hungary. After some time alone with the man, the doctor stunned the man's captors by telling them that he was not insane, nor was he speaking nonsense. In fact, he spoke a little-known Hungarian dialect and was slowly being driven toward insanity by the treatment he had received from the Russians.

After the inevitable red tape, Tamas was finally released. His first request upon gaining his freedom was for a mirror so he could see what he looked like. He had been twenty years old when he had last seen his face. Now he was a man of seventy-five. He was so utterly shocked by his appearance, not seen for fifty-five years, that he buried his face in his hands and cried uncontrollably. He could not believe this was Andres Tamas, this withered, emaciated, abused man. He had been crushed under the weight of his tormentors, was lost to the world, and was now lost to himself. He could only sob, but his tears spoke a language beyond words. I cannot even imagine what he must have felt.

It is one thing to lose one's identity at the hands of others. It is incomprehensible to lose one's identity in one's own mind. How does one know what one looks like, or what one cares to look like, if there is no mirror to reveal the face? The loss of wonder and its pursuit in the wrong areas leaves one in such a state as heart and mind become more disfigured with every wrong pursuit. Thank God, we do have a mirror to show us what we once were, what we now look like, and what, by His grace, we may yet become.

The Bible is a book of simple clarity but also of intentional mystery; both are indispensable aspects of wonder. In its clarity, we celebrate our position as the pinnacle of God's creation. In its mystery, we are dwarfed. Every facet is critical and must be understood in proper terms.

The first necessary component of wonder is profound gratitude. Much about this state of mind we understand, but we commonly embrace so little of it. Charles Caleb Colton said of gratitude, "No metaphysician ever felt the deficiency of language so much as the grateful." It is felt in the deep recesses of our soul, yet it defies the speech of the most erudite.

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